Also to answer your other question: Yes it was discovered later. It's also why bomb upgrades are permitted, as it came before a time when counting to 10 to get bombs was not known! It's a very old ruleset from what I understand, which is why there are what some might call odd concessions allowed in it.

@RaggedDan I addressed that in my post. Wrong reasons or otherwise, it's going to encourage it. And it's going to make the site worse, because now the site has intertwined money with speedrunning. Whether people beg for ego reasons or otherwise, that's a net negative.

So I do have to ask: Is there a way for communities to opt out of this? Because I guarantee you there will be those who would choose not to participate in this.

This hurts. I get it. Sites cost money to run. But at the same time, this web site was relatively ad-free for a long time.

Until the acquisition.

Hope you all realize that "boost a community/game" is going to turn into a lot of e-begging. Because you've now introduced money into what is inherently somewhere it doesn't belong. Example:

Not that the tweet makes sense since "we need players with ad-free experiences" is an odd thing to beg for, but the Boost concept is just a big enigma to folks that see the rocket skate board on every page now, and just assume it's probably like Discord Nitro where the pages themselves get more features or something.

But back to the main point: Ads barely existed. Then they got worse and worse, where they proliferated more and more content, to the point of the site committing the atrocity of replacing the bulk of the page background with ad space.

And now that it's reached peak "and this is why you use an ad-blocker in 2022", out comes the "hey guys we're on your side! Rather than fix the problem, pay us repeatedly!" Yet another subscription service for yet another web site, for people that just want to play video games fast. And I know you have to spin it like a net positive, Meta, being community manager/front-facing and all... but come on.

Maybe it's time to re-think the whole ad-spam thing, rather than just going "let's squeeze money out of our community which three years ago was barely asked for a thing"? At best, this should be a small, one-time cost, without gamifying it by throwing "boost my community please!" ads all over the site. About the only way to justify otherwise is to be 100% transparent about the operation costs for this web site, broken down sensibly, to justify why you have gone the "fleece your user base" route.

P.S. How much (dev) time, money, and effort went into building this support/boost system, instead of doing things like fixing functionality that was broken in a recent user settings update?

P.P.S. it's been months and you're still doing the awful "let's add horizontal scrolling to tabs" thing. How long does it take to realize what a mistake that was and revert it?

Good question. The field for submitting a splits.io URL is still present when submitting a new run. But indeed the display is no longer there (replaced by the ever-so-loved "comments" section).

Steps in the right direction, but still things need addressing.

Not being able to opt-in to comments and game moderators being unable to disable comments on their games probably being the biggest one of all.

IMO, comments (which should be plaintext btw, never allowing HTML or images and stuff) should only work if and only if the game has them turned on, and the runner has them turned on. If either are off, no comments for you.

The "Games and Profile Updates" run. Apparently rushed out the door to get a WR, but finished way before actually beating the game.

Time to take this one off the leaderboard until it's done properly, I think.

Frankly it's disrespectful to the community and downright irresponsible to release an update in this state.

You're leaving run submissions unmoderated and unable to be moderated due to the lackluster, and to put it bluntly, unfinished commenting feature (that nobody can opt out of). This update was rushed, not thought out, not given an opportunity for feedback prior to release, and just dumped out on a weekday afternoon with little fanfare.

Bugs are being fixed, but the huge site-affecting issues aren't being addressed.

This update should not be live yet, period. ELO, you took on a responsibility when you acquired this site. And you're leaving a stain on the community by turning a deaf ear to the volumes of "hey, this is literally harmful" feedback you're getting, while silently fixing minor things in the background.

Time to revert the changes until you get the job done properly.

Stop trying to be a Social Media. Just be a leaderboard. Just gives more unneeded work for the overworked game moderation teams.

Next time please do a beta run or preview of features to collect feedback -before- rolling out huge swathing changes like this. Because now it really feels like "yep we changed things, and you're going to have to raise hell to get us to revert anything."

Looks like they posted an announcement. https://www.speedrun.com/news/882-2021-10-14-games-profile-updates

Now let's see if they look to this thread.

This is opening the floodgates for trolling, spam, and a lot more unwelcome content that game moderators do not have the time or inclination to have to spend moderating.

Uhhhh who had the bright idea to turn a tab interface into a horizontal scrollbar that shows/hides items? One where the arrows for Next and Previous jump around the screen based on the content length of these tabs?

Have fun navigating https://www.speedrun.com/zelda1ce without pulling your hair out! Now games with several tabs have a pretty horrible user experience/interface wanting to reach other tabs, instead of all of them being available with one click.

There's a way for game page moderators to curate / fix this, right? Because if not... Yikes. I thought moderators could provide custom CSS for pages (I'm not one), but I was mistaken (unless it's a supermod-only thing?). It's an easy CSS hack to fix, but if mods can't do it...

EDIT: FURiOUS to the rescue (although "run a custom browser extension with a user stylesheet" is hardly a fix for any user coming to the site; but a good instant fix for those that can use it)! https://twitter.com/furious_/status/1448718742498779136 (custom stylesheet update for this site to undo the nonsense hidden tabs).

EDIT 2: I made a new topic because it didn't exactly fit this thread, but you can add comments to individual run submissions now. Not good. https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/22yib

By "never change" I'm referring to the API remaining free and open. Not that it remains stagnant feature-wise.

To address the API question: From what I understand talking to Elo the API will remain unchanged right now.

Could we get that to a "never change" instead of a "right now" please?

Could the new owners address the question regarding the API? A guarantee that it will remain free and open source is imperative.

Microsoft open-sources a lot of their technologies these days. You'd have to have a really good excuse to take something that's not behind closed doors and lock it away.